New Concept Marketing for EdTech

This is our first blog from a series that we are beginning in to highlight the nitty-gritties of Marketing @Vedantu. Let’s quickly brush up some basics and then I’ll take you through the various efforts of marketing put forward by my team at Vedantu.

Definition

Well, marketing has been there since the beginning of time and the definitions have kept changing ever since to accommodate the best roles for a marketer. A most recent and comprehensive definition that I could find is

‘The activities of a company associated with buying and selling a product or service. It includes advertising, selling and delivering products to people. People who work in marketing departments of companies try to get the attention of target audiences by using slogans, packaging design, celebrity endorsements and general media exposure. The four ‘Ps’ of marketing are product, place, price and promotion.’ Source.

Understanding the Definition

Although most people believe the marketing is only about sales and advertisement, but it is way beyond it. It comprises everything that a firm does to make the potential customer aware of its product/services, acquire the customers, and to build and maintain a relationship with them. So in all, marketing aims at matching the demand and supply right to ensure the profitability for an organization. In this pursuit, marketing at any organization follows some tried & tested components and invents some new ones to achieve its goals.

Here in this blog, I’ll take you through some of the marketing components that we at Vedantu used for creating the awareness around an entirely new category –Online LIVE Personalized Tutoring Service, and take it a step ahead.

Marketing at Vedantu

Category Creation

Personalized Live Online tutoring was a totally new concept for both students and parents in India though it is somewhat known in Western and a few south Asian countries. Most companies working on the online tutoring space in India were and are offering recorded lectures to students online. For us at vedantu, the first and foremost challenge was to spread awareness about the concept and bring in a behavioral change for the audience. It was important for us to make them understand that Vedantu is not doing something that every online tuition service provider is doing, but something significantly different and impactful and they can see the impact directly on their/their kid’s academic performance.

Awareness

We kick started our category creation campaigns via time-tested mass media channels in our home city – Bangalore. The objective was very clear, to educate our audience about the category we are representing and showcasing the USPs that cater to various pain points of parents and students in our city or for that matter any city in India or abroad. These campaigns gave us some great insights and helped us sense the pulse of parents & students – our actual consumers. This helped us plan better our awareness campaigns for a wider audience spread across geographies through similar and, in fact, newer and innovative channels.

One thing we always kept in mind while planning any campaign was – to raise the awareness of the category and NOT keeping the focus on brand-building for Vedantu. Also, we focused on making sure the results are measurable and are achievable with a penny-wise budget during the nascent stage of our business.

Engagement

While all our awareness campaigns were helping us rise category awareness and build brand recognition, we simultaneously launched audience engagement drives through both offline and online mediums. While social media and digital marketing gave us the liberty to connect and engage better with a much wider audience in terms of geography and reach, our direct marketing efforts helped us connect one-to-one with audiences in selected cities with acceptance towards a newer concept like ours.

This coupled initial campaigns gave a synergized effect and helped us make a mark on our audiences’ memory while still keeping our focus intact on the category creation rather than the rat-race brand-building. I want to conclude it with divulging a magical number – Almost 8 out of 10 people in Bangalore and surrounding area know Vedantu in spite of least efforts on building the brand and focusing solely on creating awareness about the new category we are playing in!

2 comments

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